New Tools, Technologies And Capabilities Always Help To Mature

Archana Deskus, CIO, Baker Hughes, Archana (Archie) Deskus is Vice President and Chief Information Officer (CIO) of Baker Hughes Incorporated. She previously served as Vice President an... More >>

New Technology Trends Shaping IndustryMobile technology and cloud services are challenging our traditional thinking on how we operate our businesses on a global basis. The rapid growth and adoption of mobile devices with seamless connectivity, GPS location services, secure commerce and consumer available products/services are creating new opportunities, competitive advantages and fundamentally changing the way we work. Cloud services are enabling faster, lower cost and scalable computing platforms. While both technology trends will create new security and support concerns, these technologies have the potential to revolutionize the way we design, manufacture, sell, and support our products/services.

One technology need of enterprises that is not satisfactorily being met by current solutions vendors
There is an absence of a comprehensive threat analytics and response technology that proactively predicts, detects and defends security threats of major corporations. In government sectors we rely on various intelligence agencies, highly trained personnel, innovative technologies and in some cases interaction with foreign intelligence relationships to defend against security threats. In the corporate environment, this technology is lagging and results in a reactive risk posture.

Challenges in the role of a CIO
Some of the challenges that I see are in determining where to invest, managing change and speed/agility of IT to meet business needs. Most IT organizations struggle to keep up with demand for new investments and often end up in the position of playing a critical role in determining where to place the big bets. We are improving our ability in these areas by using the PDM stage gate process for all of our investments to have greater consistency in the evaluation, planning and execution of our initiatives. The need for speed is accelerating the movement beyond “traditional IT” to cloud or SAS offerings and other technologies. New tools, technologies and capabilities always help us mature, but it is still the partnership and alignment with the business that is the key to overcome most of the challenges.

Innovation in Technology
Innovation has always been important. Any organization’s ability to adopt change drives competitive advantage. We use innovation workshops where we bring together multi-discipline teams to explore the value of new ideas, technologies and business processes, most of which come from outside our industry. The key is to ensure that we are innovating with a clear focus on creating business value.